Professor Margaret O’Mara presented “The Columbia: Where the Internet Lives” concluding the UW history department’s annual lecture series Feb. 12, marking the 50th installment of this lecture series.

While previous lectures in this series discussed the Nile, the Ganges, and the Rio Grande rivers, the final lecture featured the Columbia River, located in Washington state. O’Mara displayed photographs of the Columbia from the UW Libraries’ Special Collections and noted the particular importance of the land acknowledgment of the Coast Salish peoples.

O’Mara’s lecture covered the local Indigenous history of the Columbia River and historically important trades associated with the river, including the fur and salmon trades. The lecture discussed a continuing history of the industries along the Columbia River, from those early trades to today’s Google, Amazon, and Microsoft data centers.

“Here is where river history meets fashion history meets eventually high-tech history,” O’Mara said. “And why I think when we think about AI, we need to think about beaver fur and top hats.”

O’Mara highlighted how early endeavors by businessmen like John Jacob Astor fundamentally changed the region, even though Astor never set foot in Washington. The growth of the fishing and fur trapping enterprises within the Columbia region also brought to the forefront early issues of conflict between Indigenous practices, and increasing industrialization and exploitation of the Columbia’s resources.

As fishing practices changed from spear and net fishing to industrialized fishing, O’Mara explained how the ecosystem of the Columbia drastically changed.

“The salmon runs once were so great that one nineteenth-century visitor quipped that he could ‘walk across the Columbia on the backs of the fish,’” O’Mara said. “No longer.”

An image then showed the number of dams along the Columbia today, to signify the modern era of industrialization of the Columbia. O’Mara explained how early projects of industrialization such as the Grand Coulee Dam and the Hanford site during the 1940s continued to use the resources of the Columbia while Indigenous petroglyphs — eventually returned to the region — were hammered off of cliffs.

“The internet does not live in the cloud, it lives on the earth,” O’Mara said. “Congregating in certain places, and the Columbia Basin is one of them.”

Paralleling the impacts of prior industrialization periods on Indigenous communities, O’Mara showed the impact of data centers on surrounding communities: clean water is diverted to the centers and made unusable. She highlighted an investigation by The Oregonian in 2023 that determined that a Google data center was using 29% of the city water supply in The Dalles, a city on the Oregon side of the Columbia.

O’Mara ended the discussion with warnings about how the attitudes of abundance and overexploitation that drove the fur and fishing trades on the Columbia could parallel the future of data centers. Highlighting rising costs for Eastern Washington residents and ongoing legislation against data centers, she demonstrated the particular importance of this history to the region.

“This is very much a state and local story,” O’Mara said.

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